Turn-of-the-century trumpet player Buddy Bolden was the first to play blues for dancing, the first to lead a real jazz band, the first to live a flamboyant larger-than-life existence as “King” of the jazz tribe in New Orleans.

“Imagining Buddy Bolden” is a radio documentary about this first band-leading “King” of New Orleans jazz, c. 1900-06. He never recorded and to this day remains an enigmatic legend. Its my hope that listeners can imagine Bolden’s music through the words of those who actually heard or knew him and recordings of the trumpet players most likely representative of his rough, unschooled but inspiring sound.

Imagining Buddy Bolden is based largely on the research of Donald Marquis’ landmark book, In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz, 1978. Its surely the most authoritative work, painstakingly researched through hundreds of interviews, articles, oral histories, books, monographs and an exhaustive search of documentary records in Louisiana. Carefully reasoned and cautious, I believe it a reliable account of his life, sound, musical repertory and eventual insanity.

Going further, to IMAGINE Bolden, I’ve borrowed from Michael Ondaatje’s fictional biography of Buddy, Coming Through Slaughter, 1976. Its a spirited and inspired attempt to penetrate the mind and personality of the first self-invented jazz musician.

BOLDEN’s MUSIC

By all accounts Bolden did play
exceptionally loud, he played almost everything in B-flat, and though
musically untrained and lacking technique his improvisatory
embellishments, especially his expressiveness playing blues, deeply
affected all who heard him. According to musicians Kid Ory, Bud Scott
and Mutt Carey, Buddy’s fame came in part from his ability to “fake.”
Ory said that “if he forgot a passage he would introduce embellishments
that his listeners often enjoyed more than the music originally
written.” Trombonist Roy Palmer agreed: “Buddy would never bother with
written music, he faked all the time.” He in fact may have been able to
read music, but not very well and in any case he played from his head.
But Bolden’s greatest contribution was that he played blues and stomps
for dancing leading an ensemble band that enthused the populace of New
Orleans regardless of class, race or position. (Marquis, 1978)

Before
Bolden New Orleans music was still ragtime, after him it definitely
became jazz. Creole clarinetist George Baquet vividly recalled hearing
Bolden’s music the first time and its impact:

“All of a sudden, Buddy
stomps, knocks on the floor with his trumpet to give the beat and . . .
they played ‘Make Me a Pallet’. Everybody rose and yelled out “Oh, Mr.
Bolden, play it for us Buddy, play it!” I’d never heard anything like
that before. I’d played “legitimate” stuff. But this, it was something
that pulled me in. They got me up on the stand and I played with them.
After that I didn’t play legitimate so much.”(Marquis, 1978 p. 99)

And
when the occasion called for less stimulating fare his repertory
included waltzes, ragtime, slow drag, spirituals and hymns, and the
occasional Joplin rag. Still, we can only imagine what Bolden actually
sounded like because he never recorded. We can only speculate on how the
history of jazz could have differed -- and know that a Bolden recording
certainly would have demonstrated an early alternative to Louis
Armstrong’s relatively schooled sound and virtuoso soloing. Instead,
that contrast remained unnoticed until the New Orleans revival of the
1940’s brought forth rougher, more primitive sounds, initially heard by
the public from Bunk Johnson.

And while Bunk knew how to sound
like King Bolden and even recorded an invaluable medley of Bolden
variations he is not where to look for imagining Bolden’s sound. While
rich and brilliant, Bunk’s music derived from a proper schooling in
ragtime. Furthermore, Bunk has been soundly debunked on the general
subject of Bolden.

BBC Buddy Bolden Project

In 1986, Humphrey Lyttelton was engaged in a landmark BBC documentary about Bolden
the first jazz trumpeter in New Orleans. In an audacious work of jazz archaeology,
Lyttelton attempted to recreate the sound of Buddy and his band c. 1900.

He aimed for an approximation of Bolden's personal trumpet sound, band
instrumentation, performance style and repertoire. The resulting album
presented music reliably thought to be part of Bolden’s repertory and
style: “My Bucket’s Got A Hole In It,” “If You Don’t Shake,” and “Don’t Go Way Nobody,” which was reputed to be Buddy’s show opener.

TRACES OF BOLDEN

Freddie Keppard (b. 1890) who followed Bolden as “King” of the horn playing band leaders both in lifestyle and in rough, loud, blues-based improvisational lead horn is probably a closer approximation to Bolden’s general approach, though still a bit more refined than Bolden, according to contemporaneous ear witnesses. Unlike Bolden, Keppard struck out on the road with his Creole Jazz Band visiting the West Coast even before he settled in Chicago in the World War I era. Unlike Bolden, Keppard made records; though legend probably has it right that he had lost most of his power and brilliance when he finally recorded. Keppard’s Chicago recordings of 1926-27 do reveal glimpses of what must have been a very convincing blues-for-dancing power trumpet sharing Bolden’s outlook. (See discography, below.)

Other trumpeters can serve as reliable guides in helping us imagine the Bolden sound. Wooden Joe Nicholas, (b. 1883) who was recorded in the 1940s learned to play cornet by listening to Bolden, his all time favorite, and followed him wherever he played. Wooden Joe’s sound is heard and described in Bill Russell’s American Music Book/CD. He manifests the raw soulfulness reported by those who actually heard Bolden. Nicholas’ recordings of “Tiger Rag” and “Sugar Blues” -- popular New Orleans fare at the turn of the century -- bring us very close to Bolden’s music.

Trumpeter Lee Collins (b. 1901) was called “a boy with beautiful tone; he is between Buddy Bolden and Bunk Johnson . . . ” by no less than John Robichoux, Bolden’s leading band competitor at the time. This according to Collins’ autobiography, Oh Didn’t He Ramble: The Life Story of Lee Collins, 1974.

Even more recent trumpet/cornet players seem to have emulated Bolden’s general approach in their sound: Wingie Manone in the 1930s, P. T. Stanton in the 1950s, and even Clint Baker today, seem to be possessed by the spirit of Bolden’s brash, rough, blues-for-dancing, stomp, and slow drag lead horn that heralded a new music nearly a century ago.

BOLDEN’S INSANITY

Buddy Bolden’s end -- after some 25 years in a Louisiana insane asylum -- was tragic. He was hospitalized after he had band troubles, became erratic, more than usually quarrelsome, and bedridden. An incident in which he struck his mother who was tending his bedside with a water pitcher, according to newspaper reports, began the series of events leading to his lengthy internment in the Jackson Insane Asylum in 1906. During his years at the asylum he was not considered dangerous; he was free to move about and work at the hospital; and he was even known to have played his horn a bit, though never with the occasional bands formed by patients. (Marquis, 1978)

But Buddy’s condition gradually deteriorated. Eventually he became uncommunicative. After twenty years he walked around ritually touching objects and had, according to hospital staff:“ . . . a string of talk that is incoherent. Hears voices of people that bothered him before he came here . . . does no work, and spends his time waving his hands about in the air and talking with imaginary voices.” (Marquis, 1978, p. 129)

Donald Marquis rules out alcohol, or syphilitic dementia which have been suggested as possible causes of Bolden’s madness. He suggests “doubts and frustrations,” the difficulty of balancing equal weight among his simultaneous roles as idol, husband, father, lover, band leader, teacher and pupil, noting that Bolden’s“ . . . lack of a complete musical education left him vulnerable. . . . What he wanted he was not capable of fully achieving. Neither was he prepared to cope with the overwhelming fame that came early in his adult life.” (Marquis, 1978, p. 125)

Finally, by returning to Michael Ondaatje’s fictional Buddy Bolden in Coming Through Slaughter where my inspiration for “Imagining Buddy Bolden” started, we may be able to more deeply penetrate the inner conflicts of what Ondaatje depicts as Buddy’s “mad dignity.” He conjectures that Bolden was exhausted by the effort of sustaining the “King” persona he had invented for himself living outside conventional roles and rules that others had to hold themselves together or fall back on. Bolden’s insanity took him away from the grasp of others’ demands to a place with no history and no parading:“ . . . reputation made the room narrower and narrower, till you were crawling on your own back, full of your own echoes, till you were drinking in you own recycled air.”(Ondaatje, 1976, p. 86)

Air -- and its fleeting alchemical transformation into music by breath -- is Ondaatje’s fitting metaphor for Bolden’s inventiveness, brilliance and madness, as suggested in Jelly Roll Morton’s “I Thought I Heard Buddy Bolden Say”:

I thought I heard Buddy Bolden shoutOpen up that window and let that bad air outOpen up that window and let that foul air outI thought I heard Buddy Bolden say

The air of the Twentieth Century has been much enlivened by the breath of inspiration that emanated from turn of the century New Orleans. Those breaths which became magical notes still reverberate today as we try to imagine Buddy Bolden and the origin of our most unique American art form, Jazz.

DISCOGRAPHY AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

What follows are discographic and bibliographic materials for this article and sources which provided the music and readings for the radio documentary, “Imagining Buddy Bolden,” heard in September 1997 as part of the series Jazz Rhythm produced for KALW-FM, San Francisco, California 1984 - 1997 and now syndicated on public radio and internet.

DISCOGRAPHY:(All are tunes known to have been performed by Bolden except where noted.)

LYTTELTON, HUMPHREY(this album was the result of the Lyttelton Band’s musical recreation of Bolden’s sound for the BBC Radio 3 program, “Calling his Children Home’” and BBC 2 TV program, “Buddy Bolden’s Children”)“Don’t Go ‘Way Nobody,” “Funky Butt,” “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” “If You Don’t Shake, Don’t Get No Cake/Bunk Remembers,” “ Get Out of Here and Go On Home”London 7/23/86Calling My Children HomeCalligraph (LP)